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Making Lamanites: Mormons, Native Americans, and the Indian Student Placement Program, 1947-2000
Winner of the Juanita Brooks Prize in Mormon Studies
From 1947 to 2000, some 50,000 Native American children left the reservations to live with Mormon foster families. While some dropped out of the Indian Student Placement Program (ISPP), for others the months spent living with LDS families often proved more penetrating than expected.
The ISPP emerged in the mid-twentieth century, championed by Apostle Spencer W. Kimball, aligned with the then national preferences to terminate tribal entities and assimilate indigenous people. But as the paradigm shifted to self-determination, critics labeled the program as crudely assimilationist. Some ISPP students like Navajo George P. Lee fiercely defended the LDS Church before native peers and Congress, contending that it empowered Native people and instilled the true Indian identity; meanwhile Red Power activists organized protests in Salt Lake City, denouncing LDS colonization. As a new generation of church leaders quietly undercut the Indian programs, many of its former participants felt a sense of confusion and abandonment as Mormon distinctions for Native people faded in the late twentieth century.
Making Lamanites traces this student experience within contested cultural and institutional landscapes to reveal how and why many of these Native youth adopted a new notion of Indianness.
Winner of the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Book Award from the Utah Division of State History.
From 1947 to 2000, some 50,000 Native American children left the reservations to live with Mormon foster families. While some dropped out of the Indian Student Placement Program (ISPP), for others the months spent living with LDS families often proved more penetrating than expected.
The ISPP emerged in the mid-twentieth century, championed by Apostle Spencer W. Kimball, aligned with the then national preferences to terminate tribal entities and assimilate indigenous people. But as the paradigm shifted to self-determination, critics labeled the program as crudely assimilationist. Some ISPP students like Navajo George P. Lee fiercely defended the LDS Church before native peers and Congress, contending that it empowered Native people and instilled the true Indian identity; meanwhile Red Power activists organized protests in Salt Lake City, denouncing LDS colonization. As a new generation of church leaders quietly undercut the Indian programs, many of its former participants felt a sense of confusion and abandonment as Mormon distinctions for Native people faded in the late twentieth century.
Making Lamanites traces this student experience within contested cultural and institutional landscapes to reveal how and why many of these Native youth adopted a new notion of Indianness.
Winner of the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Book Award from the Utah Division of State History.
358 pages, Hardcover
Published September 30, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 17, 2019
This is an obviously well-researched book presenting a fairly balanced history of the Indian Student Placement Program run for decades by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In it, the church's motivations for creating such a program are explored, participants are quoted, and statistics are given. Having been an older teen-aged "foster sister" of a 11- 12 year old Navajo girl in the ISPP in the mid-1970's, I was interested in learning more of the history of the program. In addition, I was especially keen to learn of the reasons behind the dissolution of the program by the LDS Church, and I was also curious about the perspectives of many of the Native American youth who participated in the ISPP. The history and conclusions are honestly presented and very interesting.
December 20, 2020
A very good overview of the ISPP and it's theological underpinnings. I think it does a great job of placing agency on the Indigenous people whose lives were affected and entangled with the church, especially those who now occupy a "Lamanite" identity. However, I feel that it did not do enough of a job of analyzing how that identity in fact aided the assimilatory nature of religious colonization and genocide.
April 9, 2018
A critical look at the history of Native Americans and the LDS Church, for better and worse.
December 27, 2025
I grew up in the era of the Indian Student Placement Program (ISPP) and have a relative family that fostered a student, but I was generally oblivious to the religious, cultural, and political undertones and wrangling associated with the program. It was a little slow (thus the three stars), but informative history to help me explain a part of the world I grew up in.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews